A federal agency that provides critical land management assistance to American farmers has quietly gone dark in swaths of rural America.
Agriculture Department offices for the government’s Natural Resources Conservation Service are operating with skeleton crews across the country — or no staff at all, in some cases — at a time when farmers want expert help to restore degraded soil, manage water quality and develop land preservation plans.
Funded with billions of dollars under Biden-era legislation that was cemented into President Donald Trump’s domestic spending megalaw, the NRCS’s work is directly aligned with the Trump administration’s embrace of regenerative agriculture as part of its public health agenda.
But debilitating staff reductions have hampered farmers’ enrollment in, and implementation of, NRCS programs. That lack of federal staffers will likely mean fewer applicants, fewer approvals and more payment delays for conservation work, according to farmers and industry experts who spoke with POLITICO.
